


nothing gold can stay

by sinagtala (strikinglight)



Category: Persona 3, Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, Persona Series
Genre: Crossover Pairings, F/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Snapshots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-07 18:48:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5467232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/sinagtala
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All they have is this universe, the one in which he walks with the light behind him. In this universe, what’s left of her is bound here at the end of all things, a lock on a door, keeping the world safe.  // In which Minako remembers Souji, and listens, and watches.</p>
            </blockquote>





	nothing gold can stay

**Author's Note:**

  * For [goukyorin (sashimisusie)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sashimisusie/gifts).



> Oh god. I'm sorry for how messy this is--but then again I suppose the Persona universe is a beautiful mess in general--and for the sliiiiight-but-not-sure PQ spoilers nested in here. Still, Minako/Hamuko is good and pure and most canon.

Minako is nowhere.

That is to say, the place where Minako lies dreaming is at the end of all things, outside of space and time. She finds it’s so much easier to see everything from here, now that she’s no longer part of the world. So much easier to remember, through glass, outside looking in.

She hears her friends’ voices, once in a while. They have dreams about her from time to time, and there’s an in-between place in the middle of sleep and waking where the echoes of those dream can reach her. That’s where she waits, listening.

It’s easy to find him, too, once she remembers. She listens for his voice sometimes, but of course he’s forgotten.

 

* * *

 

In the world that she and her friends come from, it’s September of 2009. In Souji’s Inaba, it’s October of 2011. In _this_ world—Yasogami High School but not, somewhere but also nowhere—they’ve long given up trying to reconcile this discontinuity in favor of wrestling with other paradoxes. Minako’s left wondering when time became such a slippery concept it made her head spin, and how she came to be stuck in what is for all intents and purposes another dimension, arguing nomenclature with a boy from the future.

“Souji-kun, really, I don’t mind if you drop the ‘-senpai.’ We’re technically the same age.”

He isn’t very expressive, but she thinks he looks vaguely hurt when she says this. “But _I_ mind, Minako-senpai. That would be bad manners if we met in the real world.”

She can’t help but cock an eyebrow at this. “We aren’t in the real world, though. And you don’t look like the type to be so concerned about decorum.”

“Real world or no, you should be shown the respect you deserve.” He sounds deferent, almost meek, but neither does she miss the mischievous little glint in his eye—small, quick, wicked thing. “And as your vice-leader, I should defer to you in everything, Minako-senpai.”

The boy is, to add insult to injury, himself something of a conundrum.

“Fine,” she says. “Be a good kouhai, then, and take charge of drawing the map.”

 

* * *

 

Sometimes when her dreams show him to her he’s fighting, leading his friends through that bizarre, wrong-side-up world inside of the TV that reminds her so much of Tartarus. It reminds her of the labyrinths in the other Yasogami High School, the one outside of time—the surroundings just as twisted, the colors just as dizzying. Even the Shadows are the same.

In the TV world, though, he’s the leader, and he does much more than make maps. Souji’s quick and alert as the lightning that crackles from the palms of Izanagi’s hands, and he dispenses commands like he was born for it. He knows when to call for a spell, for an all-out attack, for a retreat, shuffling and dealing the cards deftly from moment to moment. His friends rally around him like soldiers to their general, and she’s almost proud of all of them. How strong they’ve grown. How hard they work to keep each other safe.

He still doesn’t really know how to use that sword of his, though. To be honest, she thinks those fine, ornate katanas are wasted on him; all he does is swing them around too fast, too heavily, without a single ounce of style. He may as well be holding a golf club. Or a baseball bat, or a shovel. But she’ll give him a pass because his friends do—because by some miracle whatever he does looks cool, and because he’s their leader.

 

* * *

 

They know they’re near the end when Margaret calls them down deep into the first labyrinth, a challenge for the two with the power of the Wild Card. On the map in Souji’s hand, the room where she waits for them is marked in red with an X.

Minako steals a glance at him as they stand outside it, and she can almost hear the clamoring of voices in both their heads, all the stars and suns, the goddesses and gods—dozens of them, hundreds. In her own world she had known that no one else was like her. That had been easy to accept, despite the noise. It had been an irrefutable fact, before coming here, before meeting him.

And yet, now that she has, she finds it’s a relief to stand beside him like this and know that they’re two of a kind. Bookends of the same soul.

“Ready?” she asks.

Souji reaches out to her, and from the first point of contact between their hands everything goes quiet in her head, quieter than she can ever remember it being. She wonders if it’s the same for him.

“I’m in your care, Minako-senpai,” he says, and she smiles. When the door opens, they step through it holding on to each other.

 

* * *

 

The town is just as he’s described, all little shops and quiet roads and the Samegawa river running like a bright, silvery ribbon through the landscape. It’s a softer, gentler part of the world than the one she remembers living in, not so irrevocably touched by death in spite of all the talk of murder that saturates the local news. This is a place that’s easy to love. She would have wanted to fight for it, too, desperately, if it had been hers.

In this place, Souji’s familiar but also not. He walks taller, stands straighter. He carries a light inside him that she knows he doesn’t see, at least not yet—golden, brilliant, growing brighter by the day. But his friends see it, and so do the people in the town, even if they don’t know they do. It’s what draws them to him, magnetic, like they want to know him, like they want to believe in him, even without knowing why.

Minako knows it all so clearly from the outside. He may have come from the city, but Souji _belongs_ in this place. He fits into it perfectly, like it was made for him, and had simply been waiting for him to come and complete it.

In this world—the real world—he doesn’t need Minako to protect him.

 

* * *

 

She has dreams sometimes about parallel universes in which they don’t miss each other, in which they don’t meet by magic because they don’t need it. She can be his big sister in one, his classmate in another. She can work the bar at his favorite coffee shop in yet another. Maybe in one they can even fall in love for real, as funny as that idea might seem. Anything would be fine, really—any lucky coincidence, any happy accident.

But all they have is this universe, the one in which he walks with the light behind him. In this universe, what’s left of her is bound here at the end of all things, a lock on a door, keeping the world safe. Keeping him safe, so he can save—not the entire human race again, not really, but just that tiny corner of it, an obscure little country town, barely a dot on the map, and already she can see how he’s changed it. She dreams that Inaba is growing, swelling to the size of a continent, all because he’s chosen to fight for it, because he’s decided to leave his heart there.

She wonders if he believes in parallel universes. She wonders if she figures into any thoughts he might have about them, however subconsciously.

 

* * *

 

As leaders ought to, the two of them stay behind until everyone else has walked through the doors.

They turn to face each other, and Minako isn’t sure how much time they spend standing there looking into one another’s eyes. The moment feels like it goes on forever, but strangely enough also like it cuts off abruptly too soon, like they’ll miss it if they blink. Souji has an odd look about him—not the usual placid expression to which she’s grown accustomed, the flat face that reminds her of still water, of a clean sheet of paper. His mouth is quirked a little to one side, and there’s something restless about that. He looks like he wants to say something, or he’s waiting for her to.

Minako doesn’t know what to make of it. She doesn’t know what to make of him, still, after all this not-time that they’ve spent together. She still doesn’t know what to _say._ Then again, maybe there’s nothing _to_ say, here at the end of everything.

Instead she grins, shakes her shoulders a little to wake herself up. Then she’s stepping away from the door, reaching up to grasp his head in her hands and guide it gently down, then she’s kissing him, and his mouth is surprisingly warm for someone who looks like he could have been chiseled out of a block of marble. He makes a small, surprised sound—she feels it, rather than hears, the vibrations rippling through her head—and his hands splay at the small of her back, pulling her in.

She knows what this is. It’s the goodbye kiss, the now-or-never kiss, the don’t-forget kiss. Almost a cliché, something out of a TV show, except it’s happening nowhere, with not-Yasogami-High-School on one side, and the sounds of home already pulling them back on another.

There’s an odd feeling that comes over her as she steps away from him. She feels flushed, brilliant, as if she’s made of the light that’s washing over them from the two open doors. There’s no other way to describe it.

“I hope you remember that,” she says. “If you remember that, I don’t mind if you forget everything else.”

He doesn’t seem to have anything to say to that, for once. All he does is stare at her, wide-eyed, fingers pressed to his lips in something that looks strangely like wonder, and the silence feels like victory. Minako wants to laugh. She wants to snap a picture of that moment, fold it up and keep it in her pocket.

“Stay gold, Souji-kun,” she says. Then she turns, and steps through the door, toward the light.


End file.
